What SCOTUSBLOG does for the Supreme Court – maintaining a steady and running review of goings on at the high court – Appellate Law and Practice does for the First Circuit, only with a little more humor and quirkiness than SCOTUSBLOG employs. A regular check of Appellate Law and Practice ensures that you don’t miss
Supreme Court Rules on Beck v Pace
I don’t generally like to play first to post, and would rather wait to see what I can add to the discussion of any particular issue before posting on a breaking story. But as I have been watching and waiting for the Supreme Court’s opinion in the ERISA fiduciary duty case of Beck v. Pace
More on Amaranth and Fiduciaries’ Due Diligence Obligations
In a post on Friday, I discussed how a large pension fund’s large losses from a hedge fund investment had given rise to litigation between the pension and the hedge fund, as discussed in this post in the WSJ Law Blog, and how it further raised the question of whether the pension plan’s fiduciaries might
A Thought About Litigation Against Fiduciaries For Hedge Fund Losses
We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the due diligence obligations of fiduciaries and other advisors to pensions, 401(k) plans and the like when it comes to investment choices. A story yesterday offers the opportunity for a little thought experiment demonstrating why it matters, and why anything less than stringent oversight and investigation of
Patenting Tax and ERISA Strategies
There’s a hot topic of discussion out there all of a sudden – I think originally triggered by this post a few weeks back by Suzanne Wynn – concerning whether ERISA strategies should be able to be patented. The discussion, thanks to a detailed look at the issue in this week’s issue of the BNA
More Recommended Reading: The Cavalcade of Risk
The Cavalcade of Risk: 1st Anniversary Edition, is now up at Insure Blog. Noting that “it was a year ago this week that we published the first Cav,” Insure Blog explains that the Cav is intended as a round up “of interesting/unusual risk-related posts from around the blogosphere.” One of my posts is up
Advertising Agencies, Copyright and Dead Pitchmen
Does copyright matter in the real world, or is it just about billion dollar disputes between media companies and Google? In my own practice I see that it does, trickling right down to employee/employer relations in knowledge based industries. This article here is a perfect, and highly entertaining, example, discussing the improper use of a
Misrepresentations and Voiding Insurance Policies: What is the Effect of Silence?
Interesting case out of the Massachusetts Appeals Court at the end of last month on one of the more difficult questions in insurance coverage law, which is when does an insured commit a misrepresentation in providing information to its insurer such that the policy should be deemed void. Lots of tricks and ins and outs
Excessive Fee Litigation, 401(k) Plans and LaRue
The current issue of the National Law Journal has an article providing an excellent overview of litigation over allegedly excessive fees charged on investments in 401(k) plans. The article notes the variations in the theories, and discusses what are likely to be large, class wide actions in the near future. There are those who think these
Commercial Arbitration and the Federal Arbitration Act
Very few things can still reduce me to an adolescent rumble of uttering very, very, very cool, and it is particularly remarkable when something in the practice of law has that effect. These three posts, from Workplace Prof, Adjunct Law Prof Blog, and SCOTUSBLOG had that effect on me when I came in